Social media accounts connected to Pentland showed that he has been stationed as a drill sergeant at Fort Jackson since 2019, according to the Associated Press. Fort Jackson is the largest U.S. Army basic training base.
Video (detailed below) of the incident shows Pentland asking Deandre what he is doing in the neighborhood before repeatedly telling him to “go away.” The footage does not capture what prompted the altercation.
Two other reports were also made against Pentland that alleged incidents of assault against the victim, Richland County Sheriff’s Department told Newsweek. Those incidents are each being investigated independently.
U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Captain Jonathan Pentland, 42, has been arrested and charged with third-degree assault. Richland County Sheriff’s Department
Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott confirmed Pentland’s arrest on Wednesday, telling reporters, “The first time I saw the video, it was terrible. It was unnecessary.” He added: “We’re not going to let people be bullies in our community.”
The Richland County Sheriff’s Department described the video as “disturbing” in a tweet issued on Wednesday, promising they “have taken this incident seriously.”
Officials at Fort Jackson also said they were looking into the incident, adding that U.S. Department of Justice authorities were investigating as well.
“This type of behavior is not consistent with our Army Values and will not be condoned,” the official Fort Jackson Twitter account posted on Wednesday, noting that they are aware of the video and “will work closely with each law enforcement agency as investigations move forward.”
Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said in a news conference Wednesday, “The first time I saw the video, it was terrible. It was unnecessary.” He added: “We’re not going to let people be bullies in our community.”
After watching the video, Fort Jackson Commanding General Brig. Gen. Beagle, Jr. said the actions were “by no means condoned by any service member.”
He later released a statement on Facebook, writing: “I remain deeply concerned for the members of our Army family, the young man and his family, and the tensions that activities like this amplify over time; please be patient as facts are determined.”
On Facebook, Johnson said she and a friend had been walking in the neighborhood on Monday when they saw what was happening. Another woman filmed the video, Johnson said, and she posted it with her permission.
“She saw the young man in distress and knew he didn’t do anything wrong so she started videoing for his safety!” Johnson wrote.
Johnson said the video did not capture the man slapping Deandre’s hand, prompting his phone to fall to the ground and crack.
She added that she waited at the scene until an officer arrived, and repeatedly told them that Deandre had been assaulted. “The officer told us that his supervisor told him that he could only charge the white guy with malicious injury to property and not assault!” Johnson wrote.
She said she and a friend “circled back to get him out of that situation bc we refused to see D go to jail or lying there dead simply bc he was black. The only thing he did was be black while walking!!!”
Newsweek has contacted Fort Jackson, Johnson, the Richland County Sheriff’s Office and the Columbia Police Department for comment.
What happened?
In the video, Deandre tells Johnson to call the police, and a woman—identified by Pentland as his wife—says that they have already been called. Then, Pentland is seen shoving Deandre.
The couple accuse Deandre of “picking fights” with people in the neighborhood.
“What is it that you are doing here?” Pentland asks Deandre.
“Well you’ve been here like 15 minutes now,” Pentland’s wife interjects.
Pentland continues: “Walk away. Walk away right now. You need help?.. I’m happy to help.”
He then denies hitting Deandre, adding that “there’s a difference between pushing you.”
He then accuses Deandre of “aggressing on the neighborhood” and, as Deandre moves a little closer to his wife, he shoves Deandre in the shoulder.
“You better walk away,” he says. Raising his voice, he ads: “You walk away. You’re talking to my wife right now.”
He continues: “Check it out, you either walk away or I’m going to carry your a** out of here.”
“You better not touch me,” Deandre tells him, remaining calm throughout the video.
“Or what?” Pentland replies. “What are you going to do? Let’s go, walk away… I’m about to do something to you. You better start walking… You’re in the wrong neighborhood motherf*****. Get out.”
“I live here, sir,” Deandre tells him.
“Where? Where’s your house? What’s your address?” Pentland asks.
When Pentland again accuses Deandre of “harassing” the neighborhood, Deandre replies: “I’m not harassing anyone, I’m walking through the neighborhood, I live here, sir.”
Pentland said that he lives in a “tight-knit community,” adding: “We take care of each other… I have never seen you before in my life.”
Getting up close to the Deandre’s face, he adds: “Check it out motherf*****, I ain’t playing with you. You either get your a** moving or I’m going to move you… I’m about to show you what I can do. You better walk away. Walk away.”
He refuses to identify himself when asked by Deandre. “Are you an officer of the law?” Deandre asks him.
“I’m about to throw you out… you wanna bet? I can do a hell of a lot more than you think I can,” the man responds.
This racist theory is rooted in white supremacist panic.
On Thursday, Fox News host Tucker Carlson caused an uproar by promoting the racist, anti-Semitic, patriarchal and conspiratorial “white replacement theory.” Also known as the “great replacement theory,” it stands on the premise that nonwhite immigrants are being imported (sometimes the Jewish community is accused of orchestrating this) to replace white people and white voters. The theory is also an inherent chastisement of white women for having a lower birthrate than nonwhite women.
“I know that the left and all the gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement,’ if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters, from the third world. But, they become hysterical because that’s what’s happening, actually. Let’s just say it: That’s true.”
Carlson continued, “Every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter.”
The whole statement is problematic. First, what is the third world? This label originated as a way to categorize countries that didn’t align with Western countries or the former Soviet bloc. It’s now often used to describe poor countries, or developing countries, and by extension, mostly nonwhite majority countries.
When Carlson worries about immigrants from the third world, he is talking about Hispanic, Asian and Black people who he worries will outnumber “current” voters. Current voters, in this formulation, are the white people who make up the majority of the American electorate.
Second, and revealingly, he is admitting that Republicans do not and will not appeal to new citizens who are immigrants.
But although white replacement theory is a conspiracy theory, the fact that the percentage of voters who are white in America is shrinking as a percentage of all voters is not. Neither is the fact that white supremacists are panicked about this.
White supremacists in this country have long worried about being replaced by people, specifically voters, who are not white. In the post-Civil War era, before the current immigrant wave from predominantly nonwhite countries, most of that anxiety in America centered on Black people.
Judge Solomon Calhoon of Mississippi wrote in 1890 of the two decades of Black suffrage following the Civil War, “Negro suffrage is an evil.”
Calhoon worried that white voters had been replaced, or outnumbered, by Black ones, writing: “Shall the ballot remain as now adjusted, the whole country in the meantime taking the chances of the rapid increase of the blacks, and leaving, in the meantime, the whites as they now are in those localities where they are outnumbered?”
Calhoon would go on to become the president of the state’s constitutional convention that year, a convention called with the explicit intention of codifying white supremacy and suppressing the Black vote. States across the South would follow the Mississippi example, calling constitutional conventions of their own, until Jim Crow was the law of the South.
The combination of Jim Crow voter suppression laws and the migration of millions of Black people out of the South during the Great Migration diluted the Black vote, distributing it across more states, and virtually guaranteed that white voters would not be outnumbered by Black ones in any state. The fear of “Black domination” dissipated.
Indeed, as extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act was being debated in 1969, The New York Times made note of the fact that Attorney General John Mitchell, a proponent of a competing bill, was well aware that even if all the unregistered Black people in the South were registered, their voting power still couldn’t overcome the “present white conservative tide” in the South. As The Times added, “In fact, Mr. Mitchell is known to believe that Negro registration benefits the Republicans because it drives the Southern whites out of the Democratic Party.”
A reporter at the time asked an aide of a Republican representative, “What has happened to the party of Lincoln?” The aide responded, “It has put on a Confederate uniform.”
But now, in addition to Black voters voting overwhelmingly Democratic, there is a wave of nonwhite immigrants who also lean Democratic. And tremendous energy is being exerted not only by white supremacists in the general population, but also Republican office holders, to attack immigrants, curtail immigration, disenfranchise Black and brown voters and assail abortion rights.
One of the surest ways of preventing a Black person from voting is to prevent them from living. As The Times reported in 1970, Leander Perez, a man who had been a judge and prosecutor and “led the last stand against integration” in Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish, once famously linked Black birth control to racial dominance, stating: “The best way to hate a [expletive] is to hate him before he’s born.”
I would even argue that the bizarre obsession with trans people is also rooted in part in white anxiety over reproduction.
The architects of whiteness in America drew the definition so narrowly that it rendered it fragile, unsustainable, and in constant need of defense. Replacement of the white majority in this country by a more multiracial, multicultural majority is inevitable. So is white supremacist panic over it.
I live in Roswell, Georgia, 20 minutes north of Atlanta. I walked in and immediately was able to vote in the general election, and was behind one person when I voted in the Senate runoff in January. Roswell is 74% white and 11% black with a population of about 90,000.
Union City, Georgia is in Fulton County along with Roswell (and most of Atlanta). Union City is 81% black, 8.6% white and has a population of just over 20,000. Here is a photo of the polling location for Union City in the general election last year.
To answer your question, perhaps those in the photo above didn’t expect to have to wait because they thought (foolishly I know) that their polling location would be similar to my own.
After all, they’re in the same county. But in the same county of a state wherein the average wait in the last hour of polling in majority-minority zones is 51 minutes, while that wait in majority-white zones is 6 minutes. But Republican lawmakers in Georgia are just “shocked” at people saying their election reforms smell just a bit like Jim Crowe.
Republican “election advisors” have been managing to get polling locations closed to “save money” in black neighborhoods for years. Those locations that managed to stay open complained to the Republican Secretary of State’s Office that they had defective or non working voting machines that needed to be replaced and received … nothing, further exacerbating wait times in polling locations that just happen to be predominately Democrat.
So why on Earth is a single person surprised when, after the state elects two Democratic Senator and a Democratic President despite all of the crap I just described, the Republican controlled State Legislature passes voting reforms that will cost the state $50 million dollars and give the Republican controlled state legislature the power to unilaterally determine a county’s election board isn’t performing adequately and take over control themselves, allow anyone in the state to contest election results if they feel like they saw fraud occurring at a polling location (keep in mind a rural outpost of this state elected Marjorie Green To Congress), and overall made it just a little more difficult and/or uncomfortable for people to vote in a manner that disproportionately affects black voters.
So it isn’t an issue of whether one is smart enough to vote. And it isn’t an issue of providing water. And it isn’t even an issue of ID, because on the list of complaints regarding voting in Georgia ID restrictions are WAY down the list. But when it’s just one thing after another to make it a little more difficult for blacks to vote over time it adds up. And collectively it’s leads to quite reasonable accusations of racism against the state assembly, corporations distancing themselves from state Republican lawmakers, and questions like this, which (to me) is implying minority voters should have to bring water with them to vote.
